Housing and Planning Bill

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I realise that it is rather unconventional for an opposition Chief Whip to speak in a legislative debate. On this occasion, however, I find the issue at hand too important not to say something. I shall make a stand by telling a personal story, which in turn makes a political point.

As a child, you wonder and worry about change. Sometimes it terrifies, sometimes it worries and sometimes it brings relief. I grew up in a pretty village halfway between Colchester and Clacton, called Great Bentley. My mother Enid proudly told me from an early age that it was mentioned in the Domesday Book, but more significantly that it had the largest village green in all of England. Enid was a housekeeper and a cook—probably the last live-in servant in the village. Live-in servants, as watchers of “Downton Abbey” will have observed, were vulnerable to the whims and lives of their patrons. After five years of working for the Franks family, Commander Franks unfortunately died and the big house in which we had been given rooms had to be sold. In short, we were homeless.

For the next three years, the cosy certainties that I had become accustomed to as a small child seemed to have gone. My mother was a resourceful woman, and as I discovered over time, she had a plan, which involved using her limited savings to buy, for the princely sum of £250, a small cottage, which she then had work done on while friends put us up. The plan was also to turn her independent spirit into a romance, which in time saw her married when I was just eight. Marriage, however, brought a dilemma: my mother owned a home and her husband was a council tenant. But she moved in with him and we made the council bungalow our home too. It had many advantages over our cold cottage: it was well repaired, had hot running water and electricity, and was not hard to heat. Best of all for the younger Bassam, it had a television.

Sadly, my mother’s happiness in finding companionship did not last long. Her partner had led a hard life, including fighting in the trenches of the First World War. It all caught up with him and he died at just 66. Luckily, the local authority passed the tenancy on to Enid, and for the rest of my years living at home, we shared a life on De Vere Estate—something unimaginable under the Bill we are debating here today, where councils would only be able to offer two to five-year tenancies.

Typical of most council estates in the 1960s, De Vere Estate provided good-quality housing for working-class families to a standard that previous generations could only have dreamed of. Our neighbours worked on local farms, in engineering companies and at the Colchester Co-op, or did part-time work in local school canteens and factories. There were plenty of builders, carpenters, railway workers and even a couple of dustmen. The estate had 50 houses on it. Most households worked hard, few complained and all but a handful read the Daily Mirror.

Many of the measures in the Bill will undermine the sort of progress that that generation enjoyed, not just through the general loss of security or the reduction in affordable social housing but through the loss of community. On De Vere Estate, I came to know most people who lived close by. I went to school with their sons and daughters, played in the village football and cricket teams, and delivered their daily newspapers. Like most on the estate, I failed my 11-plus—not for want of trying, I hasten to add, and as I had to explain to my mother—but later on I did well enough to get the grades to go to university.

What political conclusions do I draw from all of this? Put simply, the Conservative Party in the immediate post-war period was as committed as Labour to the development of local authority housing. De Vere Estate started under Bevan and was finished under Macmillan. Some of its builders lived in the homes they built. De Vere provided a stable community and good housing at reasonable rents. There were bungalows for older residents. Tendring District Council was perhaps not the best of landlords, but it did repairs, collected rents, helped in bad times and housed those in most need. Local people seemed to get priority in lettings, and families were helped to stay close to one another—something Labour will continue to push for with the Bill, including through like-for-like housebuilding in local areas when social housing is sold off.

De Vere Estate was successful social engineering, albeit on a modest scale. Sadly, all of this began to change after the introduction of right to buy. The De Vere tenants were not daft and saw a bargain when it was offered. Some I know, including my mother, were not happy but took a punt because it made financial sense, even if it did not help future generations. They reckoned that at least they could pass their homes on securely. Some of my contemporaries still live in the homes their parents lived in, but many now also view their estate as providing someone else’s profit rather than a home. I doubt that more than a handful of council tenancies still exist.

I owe my De Vere Estate upbringing a debt of gratitude. Life was hard, but there was fairness and a community solidarity to it—far removed from the Government’s proposed policies of moving tenants on after four, five, three or two years perhaps, limiting tenancies to low-income bands, charging ever higher rents and focusing solely on home ownership at the expense of truly affordable housing. All of that will be—indeed is—socially divisive. It will stigmatise families and be another nail in the coffin of the post-war settlement that helped people get on in life—aspiration—and provided a degree of security. I take the view that we should resist these changes as robustly as we can. If we do not, we will regret it, and young people will ask in future how on earth a Government could get away with such a grand theft of the public realm.